Arnold Schwarzenegger: Making It Big

Arnold Schwarzenegger is as determined as he is big. How else could the wild Austrian *Über-*man
have made it as a movie star (his latest, Total Recall, opens this month), a real-estate mogul, a
Kennedy intimate even before his marriage to Maria Shriver, and now a happy father and President
Bush’s fitness czar? Lynn Hirschberg meets Mr. Big.

Arnold Schwarzenegger on the cover of the June 1990 issue of V.F. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Ten years ago, John Milius, the director of Conan the Barbarian, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the
man who would be Conan, were about to be interviewed by a reporter from one of the three top TV
networks. Ever savvy about marketing, Schwarzenegger had insisted that the subject of the interview
be Conan the Barbarian rather than bodybuilding, the sport for which he was famous. “Arnold didn’t
want to discuss being Mr. Olympia,” recalls Milius. “He wanted to talk about the film.”

Yet as soon as the camera began rolling, Milius says, the reporter went back on his promise and
asked, “So, Arnold, why have you pumped up your body? Do you feel inadequate in some way? Are
you overcompensating for some deficiency?” Seemingly unfazed by the reporter’s duplicity,
Schwarzenegger smiled and said, “Well, I got into bodybuilding for a few reasons. I was always
interested in proportion and perfection. When I was fifteen, I took off my clothes and looked in the
mirror. When I stared at myself naked, I realized that to be perfectly proportioned I would need twenty-
inch arms to match the…rest of me.”

“At that point, Arnold paused,” says Milius. “He stared at the guy, who was stunned. Arnold just smiled
and said, ‘Can we talk about the movie now?’” Milius laughs. “Arnold has always had that confidence.
He knows how to turn things around.”

Conan went on to be an enormous hit, grossing more than $100 million worldwide, and
Schwarzenegger, an extremely unlikely choice for superstardom—his accent alone would seem to be
a stumbling block—became an instant sensation. During the 1980s, Schwarzenegger’s films grossed
more than $1 billion, due in part to the fact that he is hugely popular in almost every foreign market—
Schwarzenegger is Superhero to the World. “Arnold has the ultimate power in Hollywood,” says a
studio head who would love to work with him. “And that is, he can get a project made. His latest film,
Total Recall, was in development ten years, until Arnold said yes.” For saying yes, Schwarzenegger
will receive $10 million plus 15 percent of the gross.

But despite the big bucks, Schwarzenegger’s movie career is not his only interest. He’s a real-estate
tycoon, with properties in Southern California and Denver. And he’s a family man—his wife is NBC
reporter Maria Shriver, and they’ve just had their first child. Most recently, Schwarzenegger was
named chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, a job he terms “a fun challenge.” All
the way around, Schwarzenegger, who became a citizen of the United States only seven years ago, is
a walking, talking embodiment of the American Dream.

It’s a chilly Friday in early April, and Schwarzenegger is standing in the boys’ locker room in a high
school in Virginia. It’s a school holiday, but somehow word got out that Arnold is coming!!! Two
hundred screaming high-school students show up to meet and greet him. They begin shouting when
they see his limo pull up the drive. As Schwarzenegger emerges from the car, boys, girls, parents,
and teachers yell, “Arnold! Arnold! Arnold!” and follow him as he’s taken into the boys’ locker room.
“This is amazing,” one girl shrieks to her friend. “I’ve never even been in a boys’ locker room before,
and now I’m here with Arnold!”

Schwarzenegger seems oblivious to the hubbub, and patiently signs autograph after autograph. For a
fan, Arnold is a dream celebrity. He’s tolerant, he’ll answer almost any question, and he’s literally
bigger than life. Most movie stars appear to be scaled-down in person, but at six feet two inches, 210
pounds, Schwarzenegger is an impressive sight. “He’s…huge,” says one admiring male fan in a
Fairfax High letterman jacket. “What a bod!”

Schwarzenegger is here to pose with ten kids for a poster that will promote fitness in high schools
across America. Fitness is Schwarzenegger’s most recent mission. It was his idea to assume the
leadership of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. After actively campaigning for Bush in the
last election—“I only play the Terminator in my movies,” he told Americans everywhere, “but, let me
tell you, when it comes to the American future, Michael Dukakis will be the real Terminator”—
Schwarzenegger, who is a staunch Republican, went to his president and asked to be made
chairman. Bush readily agreed and Schwarzenegger has big plans for fitness, an issue that is
nonpartisan, noncontroversial, and, some believe (although Schwarzenegger demurs), a high-profile
launchpad for his career in politics. “Who doesn’t believe in fitness?” asks Schwarzenegger. “My goal
is to make fitness hip.”

After he has signed autographs for forty-five minutes, it is time for the photo shoot. Schwarzenegger
is ushered into a small room to change into shorts and a T-shirt. When he emerges from the changing
room, there are more screams, and a stampede ensues as he tries to make his way out to the football
field, where the photos will be taken. Despite the commotion, Schwarzenegger is calm, wonderfully
good-humored. “I guess I’m used to that attention,” he says later. “Even when I was eighteen and I
was competing in bodybuilding and no one knew about it, there would be a hundred guys standing
around at the car. Beyond those hundred people, nobody knew about me, but those hundred guys
were waiting for my little Volkswagen to arrive. I grew up with this attention very slowly—it increased
systematically. With each project that I did, each interview, each movie, each TV show, it grew.”

Characteristically, Schwarzenegger has a certain commonsensical perspective on almost everything,

from his fame to his career to his new infant daughter, Katherine Eunice. It is his nature to work very
hard, to be extremely disciplined, and yet he is a bit self-mocking. He realizes that to have a sense of
humor is to be disarming, and as a result, he seems to take nothing too seriously, least of all himself.
This attitude seems quite instinctual, just as his gift for marketing seems a natural trait. He is a born
salesman—whether he’s pushing bodybuilding or Total Recall or fitness. In all cases, he believes with
a vengeance. And that belief is compelling.

His first crusade was, of course, bodybuilding, which, as John Milius says, “was confined to the back of
comic books. Until Arnold, people thought bodybuilders were perverts or vain circus freaks. Arnold
changed that. He turned himself into a household word and made it a virtue to work out.”

Schwarzenegger’s interest in bodybuilding began when he was a child just outside Graz, Austria. The
Schwarzenegger family of four—Arnold’s father was a policeman, and his only sibling, a brother, later
died in a car accident—did not have a telephone or a flush toilet or a refrigerator until he was
fourteen. “With that kind of upbringing,” says Schwarzenegger, “you learn not to take anything for
granted.”

You also look for a way out. Schwarzenegger, who is now forty-two, would “daydream about success
when I was ten years old. I would dream about America.” At fifteen, he began bodybuilding. Five years
later he won his first Mr. Universe title.

A sensation in Europe, Schwarzenegger arrived in America in 1968 to compete in a bodybuilding

tournament in Miami Beach. Although he expected to win handily, he lost. But Joe Weider, the most
prominent bodybuilding mogul in America, realized Schwarzenegger’s potential and invited him to Los
Angeles. “I loved California,” says Schwarzenegger. “I decided to move. There was no alternative. The
thought of going back to Austria or Germany was not an option. My vision of where I wanted to be in
my life was forward, and Austria would have been backward.”

Once Schwarzenegger moved to California, he began to train like mad. He also went to school—he
studied English and business—and Weider had him writing articles and posing for photographs. In his
sport, Schwarzenegger, who eventually won an unprecedented seven Mr. Olympia titles, was quickly
becoming a god.

But Schwarzenegger was interested in reaching a wider audience. In 1972 he met George Butler and
Charles Gaines at the Mr. America contest in New York. They were planning a book and a movie
entitled Pumping Iron, and they were immediately taken with Schwarzenegger. “Arnold is like the
Matterhorn,” Gaines has said. “We didn’t discover him, we just noticed him first.”

Pumping Iron not only introduced Schwarzenegger to the mainstream but also made him the darling of
the high society/Andy Warhol set. He was game for anything: he participated in a “living-art exhibit” at
the Whitney Museum, where he posed alongside slides of great works of art by the likes of
Michelangelo and Rodin in order to answer the question, Is this today’s ideal body? He modeled for
artists Jamie Wyeth. Elaine Kaufman threw a party for him in her restaurant, and Jacqueline Onassis
attended and made a fuss over him. Through it all, Schwarzenegger had a blast, but he never forgot
his original mission—the message was always bodybuilding.

To achieve that end, in interviews Schwarzenegger would equate bodybuilding with sex: he’d claim
that pumping up felt better than an orgasm. “The whole thing was to make bodybuilding hip,” he says,
“to take it out of the sports page or the circus page or whatever and have it covered in the regular
press. What was so smart is we got involved with people who were eccentric. They understood our
sport. Andy Warhol was all over me with his Polaroid camera, taking pictures, and then one day I
walked in there and he had a whole bunch of guys lying on top of each other, and he was taking
pictures of asses and calling it landscapes. I said, ‘O.K. Whatever.’”

At that time, the ultimate goal for Schwarzenegger was to be in feature films. He had already made his
big-screen debut in the disastrous Hercules Goes to New York under the pseudonym Arnold Strong.
But since Schwarzenegger never makes the same mistake twice, he started aiming for a better part,
with his given name in the credits. With Charles Gaines’s help, Schwarzenegger landed a role in Stay
Hungry, directed by Bob Rafelson. The movie, which is Arnold’s best, came out just before Pumping
Iron, making the back-to-back films a one-two Schwarzenegger punch.

Always good at assessing his own potential, Schwarzenegger—who had retired from bodybuilding—
heard that producer Dino De Laurentiis was making a film out of Flash Gordon, and Arnold though he
would be right for the part. De Laurentiis was not so enthusiastic, and personally the two men did not
hit it off. In the end, Schwarzenegger didn’t get to play Flash, but the movie bombed. And when De
Laurentiis decided to make Conan the Barbarian, director John Milius insisted on Schwarzenegger. “It
became a great relationship,” says Schwarzenegger, who worked with De Laurentiis on two more
films. “I learned a lot from him.”

Schwarzenegger has a history of forging close relationships with strong producers. He tends to work
with people more than once—Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver (Commando, Predator), Mario Kassar
and Andrew Vajna at Carolco Pictures (Red Heat and Total Recall).

Most of his movies were big hits, but even the flops, like Red Sonja, don’t really upset
Schwarzenegger. He doesn’t dwell on past mistakes—he moves on. “I got that from sports,” he says.
“You go back to the gym and you just do it again and again until you get it right.”

Schwarzenegger has much the same message for the kids who are posing with him for the poster. He
asks one girl if she’s a runner. She nods yes. “Everything that happened in my life—including meeting
my wife—was due to my sports background,” he says to her rather inspirationally. “It’s true that
bodybuilding was a means to an end, but you cannot forget your means.” The girl nods. “Now let’s
run,” he says. “Let’s get this going.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger never sleeps late. Ever. “At six A.M.,” he says, “I always feel I should be up
and doing something productive.” He works out daily, usually heading off to the gym early in the
morning. “I do not miss a day. It keeps me in check—bench-pressing three hundred pounds will
always be bench-pressing three hundred pounds. That will never change, no matter how much money
I have or how famous I am.”

Although Schwarzenegger sometimes seems like a good-guy version of the robotic alien he played in
The Terminator, he does not view his extraordinarily disciplined life as a grind. For him, a well-ordered
mind and body, along with a sense of humor, are the keys to success and happiness. He is absolutely
sure of this—in fact, there is nothing conflicted about Schwarzenegger. This trait—his absolute,
profound lack of ambivalence—is crucial to his appeal. “Arnold’s confidence is not surprising if you
consider what he’s accomplished,” says Paul Verhoeven, the director of Total Recall. “After all, he did
what seemed impossible. He was not a logical choice for fame. But Arnold’s drive and his charm made
him different. It made him a star.”

“But he is an oddball,” says an actress who played opposite him. “Arnold is quite goofy. He’s
disciplined about work, but he’s equally disciplined about play. Arnold likes to be noticed in all things.”

Schwarzenegger is proud of this tendency. “Everything I do, I go beyond,” he says, cracking himself
up. For example, purple is his favorite color, so he had his Harley-Davidson motorcycle painted
purple. “You can imagine,” he says, laughing. “It’s a huge bike, and it’s very colorful.” Arnold likes
anything colorful—he favors wildly patterned baggy shorts over the traditional gray workout ensemble,
and instead of a simple gold band for a wedding ring, his has a dark-blue (“It’s purplish”) star
sapphire. “I didn’t like the traditional ring,” he says. “Anything that has to do with tradition—ugh.”

“Arnold is extreme,” says the same actress, “which is why he is such a great movie presence. But he’s
always aware of Arnold in relation to others. He’s the most confident person I’ve ever met.”

“So now you’re a dad!”

Schwarzenegger is at yet another school, this time an elementary school, posing for yet another
fitness poster, and there are, as always, fans present. This time the fans are about ten years old.
“You’re a dad!” says one little girl for the second time. “Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” says Schwarzenegger. “My daughter is four months old.”

Katherine Eunice Schwarzenegger is a very pretty baby, with dark hair, like her mother’s. She’s not
particularly large, which wouldn’t be a notable fact except that she is related to Arnold. Marriage and
fatherhood seem to agree with Schwarzenegger. He is not one of those goony born-again fathers who
tell romantic stories about the miracle of natural childbirth and the joys of diapering, but he’s clearly
entranced with the kid. He hardly sleeps anymore—he gets up when the baby gets up.

“It’s not surprising that he’s good with the baby,” says a friend of the Schwarzeneggers’. “Arnold has a
sort of suburban streak. Rich suburban, but suburban all the same.” His life at home in California,
where he and Maria and the baby and their Labrador retrievers and their horses all live on a palatial
estate in Pacific Palisades, is, by all accounts, quite relaxed. “Maria is a girly girl,” says one friend,
“meaning, she has a lot of girlfriends. She’s nice to women. And she organizes these potluck dinners.
I remember being at one, and there was Arnold smoking a cigar, with all these girls swirling around
him.”

The Schwarzeneggers’ living room converts into a screening room, and he shows one or two movies a
week at the house. “I loved Field of Dreams,” he says. “It made me cry. I saw it twice.” He and Maria
are also out quite a bit—at movie openings and charity events. “Arnold is a social kind of guy,” says a
friend. “But not in the sense that he’s a social climber. He’s just outgoing. He likes it when there are
lots of people around—that’s why he likes the gym and the Shrivers so much. He’s prone to a kind of
convivial camaraderie.”

“I love to schmooze,” says Schwarzenegger. That certainly seems to be the case today. If this photo
shoot is any indication, Schwarzenegger has a natural rapport with children. The seven kids climb all
over him as if he were a piece of gym equipment. Schwarzenegger does a sort of paternal flirt with
each of them, teasing them about their math classes and, of course, asking them whether or not they
have been playing sports or lifting weights. “Make a muscle,” Schwarzenegger says. “Show off those
muscles.”

After signing some autographs, Schwarzenegger heads back to the school’s administration office to
change clothes. Halfway down the hall, a small child, about six or so, sneaks out of a classroom.
When she looks up, just inches from a clean getaway, she sees Schwarzenegger walking down the
hall. He stares at her and says, in his best superhero voice, “Get back to class!” The poor child thinks
she had a vision—has Conan become the new hall monitor?—and looks positively terrified. She runs
back into the classroom.

“Do you see the effect I have?” asks Schwarzenegger, laughing. “Very scary.”

“What is this?” Schwarzenegger is saying. “What are you giving me?” Dressed in a gray suit and
maroon tie, he is standing in a meeting room on the third floor of the Westin Hotel in Washington, D.C.
A woman who works for the Council on Physical Fitness has just handed him a script. “I get scripts
everywhere. At the gym, at the gas station, and now from you.” The woman, who is around sixty,
explains that the script was written by her daughter. “Will I see you tomorrow?” he asks. “I don’t know,”
she says. “I don’t feel so hot.” “Really?” says Schwarzenegger. “You look hot. You look really hot!”

He is halfway through a daylong meeting of his fitness council. Milling about this room are thirteen of
the committee members, including tennis pro Pam Shriver and gymnast Peter Vidmar.
Schwarzenegger flirts with everyone. He teases men about their lack of abdominal muscles and
questions women about their attire. “You wore the black stockings today,” he says to one woman. “Did
you wear those for me?”

As would be expected, Schwarzenegger is an inspirational committee chairman. “Fitness has to be

marketed like a vehicle or a TV set or a movie,” he says to the group. “We have to say, ‘It’s hip to be
fit. That’s it. Read my hips. No more fat.’” He laughs. “You like that? I just improvised.”

Nothing that Schwarzenegger says is particularly profound, but his zeal is astonishing. He seems
tireless. “I’ve been watching him for days now,” says one committee member, “and I still can’t get over
his enthusiasm. He’s obsessed with this thing.”

As the meeting draws to a close, one of the members of the committee moves to the back of the room.
“He’s not what I though he’d be,” she says as she gets her coat to leave. “I mean, I had heard things
about him, and I was expecting something else.” The woman pauses. “You know, I’d seen the book.”

The book the woman is talking about is Arnold, a recently published, unauthorized biography by
Wendy Leigh. It makes much of Schwarzenegger’s alleged womanizing and accuses him of being,
essentially, a Nazi sympathizer, due to his friendship with Kurt Waldheim. “Arnold is not in any way,
shape, or form a Nazi sympathizer or a believer in Nazi doctrine,” says an old friend, who chooses to
remain anonymous, owing to Schwarzenegger’s sensitivity about the book. “She had it pretty much
right about the girls—before Maria, Arnold was a champ in that area—but she was dead wrong about
everything else.”

Schwarzenegger claims he has not read the book, and he says he did not see the National Enquirer
story that previewed juicier sections. “The National Enquirer story hit when I was down in New Orleans
making a speech at a health-and-fitness convention,” he recalls. “I thought I should have a joke about
the story. So I went out there and I said, ‘Thank you so much for inviting me down here. It means a lot
to me, because it means that not everyone believed what they read in the National Enquirer.’ The
audience started laughing, so I knew, Aah, some of them must have seen it. So I said, ‘For those of
you who don’t know about it, I was just again on the cover of the National Enquirer, and I don’t care, to
be honest, if they call me a murderer or charge me with treason, but did you see the picture they
used? That really pissed me off.’” Schwarzenegger pauses. “You have to move forward and be
offensive,” he says. “For every punch, there’s a defense. There will always be those ten guys
shooting at you, but you must live on the offensive.”

This is exactly the same message Schwarzenegger gives to his committee. It is, in fact, the Arnold
message: You must live on the offensive. Forget the book. Forget the obstacles. Remember your
sense of humor, and always, always keep your eye on the prize.

Before he begins production on a new film, Schwarzenegger has a recurring dream. “A week or so
before I start, I always have a nightmare. In the dream, I am sitting naked in the dark, with the cameras
ready to roll. And I’m not prepared—I don’t have my clothes on, the scene isn’t ready, and I don’t
know what I am trying to shoot. Then I wake up, and it’s the middle of the night, and I look around and
I think, Wait, I’m not ready.” Schwarzenegger pauses. “I have no patience for my dreams—my life is
quite interesting enough, and there’s not much room for another dimension. But I have this dream
before every movie.”

Schwarzenegger is not about to interpret his nightmare—self-analysis does not interest him, and he is
“totally against” psychiatrists. “To me, analysis takes away from enjoyment,” he says. “Can you
imagine if you intellectualized sex?”

Nevertheless, the dream is somewhat appealing—it proves that, contrary to all appearances,
Schwarzenegger does in fact have anxieties. He claims that he doesn't really worry, and he does
seem remarkably happy being Arnold, but still, there is that nightmare. Perhaps Schwarzenegger has
at least a tiny dark side.